How we got the images you weren’t meant to see in YemenJuly 3, 2018 2:44 PM ESTAs I arrived in Sana’a city late at night on June 6, the few working street lights cast a glow over the closed doors of shops, trash on the streets, and the earthen color of the buildings. All so familiar. Driving past the enormous Saleh Mosque — a major landmark in the capital — the sign now read “the people’s mosque” in Arabic. Yemen’s former, long-time dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, had turned against the Houthi rebels occupying this city in December and paid with his life. All visible reminders of him have been removed.https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/reporting-in-yemen-the-city-that-has-fallen-off-a-cliff

Jane Ferguson is risking her life right now to report the news from Yemen for PBS

Yesterday, at risk to her life, Jane Ferguson reported on the PBS’ excellent News Hour from the only open port in Yemen from which food and medicine can still be shipped to provide relief to millions of civilians . A fragile cease-fire the UN negotiated in Sweden may bring a modicum of hope in a country where tragedy prevails.

Meanwhile, also on the PBS network, Washington Week—once the premier weekly opinion program in the US—exemplifies the dominant isolationism of,the White House Corps. On Friday night Washington Week continued to ignore ( as it has for years) the humanitarian tragedy in Yemen and President Trump’s complicity in Saudi genocide.

PBS should immediately appoint Jane Ferguson Washington Week’s peermant moderator,replacing Robert Costa who covers the White House for The Washington Post. If Ferguson is not available, Reporters without Borders has many brave reporters on the front lines of the world’s humanitarian crises. American politicians tell the public we are the leading power in the world. If that power is to mean anything, it must be used to resolve crises— not hide from them and pretend they do not exist.

Reporters such as CNN’s Arwa Damon bring the news of US complicity or indifference to the millions of children and their parents dying . Meanwhile, their coverage of life and death issues do not receive priority coverage. Instead, the majority of the well-tailored White House Press Corps seems to focus exclusively on the Presudent’s soap opera machinations.

Remember, if the public had to rely on the White House Press Corps during Watergate, Richard Nixon would have completed his second term in office. Woodward and Bernstein were not a part of the White House Press Corps. They were low-level reporters covering night court.

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Friday night should cause Bob Costa and his Washington Week panelists shame for failing even make mention of the two Senate resolutions on Yemen

For the past four years, 88,000 children have died needlessly, avoidably in Yemen. The Guardian reports starvation on a mass basis has become so severe people are committing suicide rather than wait to die from hunger and cholera.

Is this US Senate vote too little too late? As international journalists risk death to cover the horror, will the US press (for the most part) continue to ignore the reports of US assistance in Saudi genocide?

Or will Robert Costa and his fellow Washington Week reporters on the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) continue to disregard (as they have been for the past four years) infants being bombed in hospitals and schools—preferring to critique President Trump’s capitalization within his lunatic tweets?

PBS’ hour long nightly news is the best news program on American television broadcasting the courageous Jane Ferguson from a bombed out Physicians without Borders hospital tent in Yemen.

Yet, Washington Week—hitherto regarded as the premier opinion program in the country ( in the tradition of, for example, my late friend Eileen Shanehan)—will certainly devote considerable space to the President’s efforts to hire a new chief of staff.

I predict that tonight’s broadcast will devote more time opining on whether Jared Kushner is qualified for the job at the expense of any international news story.

Of the two Yemeni developments this week, the Senate non-binding resolution may be mentioned because of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ role in drafting the resolution. (No doubt Costa is aware a significant number of his viewers are Sanders supporters.)

I would be pleasantly surprised if the truly significant Yemeni story of the week was covered at all:

A UN brokered truce with the Yemeni combatants. The truce could easily result in hundreds of thousands of lives being saved because of the truce, Yemen’s last operating port will/may not shut down distribution of food and medicine.

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Note: My comment was published early on Friday morning December 13th before the announcement that President Trump selected by tweet Mitch Mulvaney as his acting Chief of Staff.

Take note Washington Week, this is the kind of reporter your panelists should emulate

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“Once inside, there is an unnerving quiet to the children’s ward. The healthier babies cry, but many just stare blankly. It’s not immediately clear if their eyes look too big or their faces too small.

“Malnourishment can have very few tell-tale signs to an untrained eye — perhaps just a paleness, a smallness. As the scale continues, some children have lost hair or had their hair turn orange, some have swollen bellies, or no belly to speak of, or bones sticking out through wilted skin. Some of them have aged faces, with skin that wrinkles when they cry.

“The healthier babies cry, but many just stare blankly.

Their parents have exhausted all “coping mechanisms” as the aid organizations would say. To you or I, that’s anything we would turn to if a salary suddenly stopped: savings, relatives, a cow or some chickens in the backyard, a line of credit at the local grocery store. After three years of war, most people have exhausted all of those. Sweet tea and bread is keeping an untold number of people here alive, barely. It’s especially tough on the babies as mother’s cannot produce enough high nutrient milk when they themselves are not eating nearly enough.”

After years of effort— of driving his Senate colleagues crazy by insisting every time he rose to speak—that the Senate ratify the genocide treaty, it is now a matter of law that the kind of genocide the US participates in today ( right now) must result in the US being tried in the World Court if our country does not stop it.

Last week, when the Senate took initial steps to end this the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, this— to its shame—is what the trendy news organizations ignore. CNN, MSNBC, and nearly everyone else on US television have been flogging to death for the previous two days, the same old same old Washington Week’s host decided to repeat yet again on Friday night.

No one at Washington Week saw fit to even mention Yemen. How many more infants have to die in Yemen before Robert Costa decides it worthy of even ten percent of his show’s time?

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